Softbank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son wants to raise $100 billion for a new company focused on artificial intelligence microchips, according to Bloomberg.
The venture, dubbed Project Izanagi, is aimed at setting up an AI chip company to complement Softbank’s Arm and to challenge Nvidia’s position in the AI chip market. Son has artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that surpasses human intelligence.
Izanagi is the Japanese god of life and creation, giving some sense of the level of importance that Son sees in AGI, which he sometimes refers to as a “singularity”; the last three letters of the name are also AGI.
“AGI is what every AI expert is after,” Son said, as reported by Bloomberg. “But when you ask them about a detailed definition, a number, the timing, how much computing power, how much smarter AGI is than the human intelligence, most of them don’t have an answer. […] I have my own answer: I am convinced AGI will be real in 10 years.”
Project Izanagi is reportedly separate from any plans to work with OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman on Altman’s effort to raise $5-$7 trillion to boost global AI chip-making capacity and related infrastructure and processing needs for AI. Altman posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, earlier this month about the need for more AI infrastructure than people are currently planning to build.
Son’s financial bets have met with mixed results, from the acquisition of and continued success of Arm, to billions of dollars in losses for Softbank’s $100 billion Vision Fund due to investments that included companies such as WeWork.
Speaking at the SoftBank World corporate conference in October 2023, Son said he believes AGI will be ten times more intelligent than the sum total of all human intelligence. Arm CEO Rene Haas, speaking at the same conference via video, said that Arm’s designs would become increasingly sought after to power artificial intelligence, according to reporting by Reuters.
